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Show 7i : ' mtmX Kathleen Norris V iWl MiirhflJ Illustration CHAPTER IX Continued 16 "I-jlc, wouldn't It Ins funny IT I with ri'iilly tn b a wrilcr snini; ilnyV ""I'o tin; ili'iir iiii'innry of my Kin t.T, Kdilli I'nrlliiulon I.nwri-nce." The pen toui'lmil tlio paper; Lilian to move. lutiny Hlcit ili'-cply, luxuriously, In tho -ciitiT of the l)lk' hcd, tlio ..lil woolly d"K tiKlilly chiHpcil to his sliuhliy llttlii iMidi'rwuist. Italn unvalued steadily down tlio high windows, anil dnmiini'il on the tin root'; the lils,'h feathery new tops of the trees he-low moved gently In the constant onslaught of tho warm drops. Wood fell In the stove, and llained up and was quiet nfjain. Alter awhile Call threw a covered cov-ered nheet aside, numbered a sec- :nl, covered that. Sho pushed back her hair; her face was pale, tier eyes shining. The scratching of the pen recommenced. The clock struck, si ruck again. Danny slept on, und I lie rain continued to fall. I'.ut at six, when Lily was home mid the hoys having supper In the I; lichen, a hot, golden sunset suddenly sud-denly broke over the world. Gall walked up past tho old slahles, and saw the light shining red on the H unks of the oaks and on the village vil-lage and on the woodpile and straining strain-ing itself through the screen of the young grapo leaves. Everything .sparkled and glittered, scents heavy, wet and delicious crowded the air; the tiny yellow balls of chickens, cheeping and tumbling after their olliclous mother across the wet grass, wero almost more of beauty than the human heart could bear. She reflected that she would do her full share of the dinner work Jind of the dishwashing afterward. Then she would take a bath, and get Into pajamas and wrapper, and arrange shoes and dre;s for the library li-brary day tomorrow, and carry her week's laundry for this was Sunday Sun-day night out to the big basket In the upper back hall. And she lighted her desk lump, and drew those live scribbled pages toward her, and In the silence and solitude of her own room read tliem once again and found them good. The loss of Ariel, the deeper blow of Dick's loss, Phil's marriage had been earthquake, the unbearable unbear-able last burden after the burdened years. And beyond that had been the consuming llame of Edith's going, go-ing, the unthinkable thing, the death of something that was herself, that as her own life. The earthquake and the fire. And now Into Gall's heart comfort came creeping back, new Interest, new hope the still small voice of the Lord. Thus began the new life, In the unchanged setting of the old. Gail did not know whether what she dreamed and what she wrote was good or was not good, nor did she care. It had to come, and the coming com-ing was a sort of ecstatic bearing n giving of life. In April she had the letter; a dozen typewritten lines: "Pear Miss Lawrence: "The readers report that, delightful delight-ful as this story Is, It Is 'not quite in urn lone. iie leriuig ul uie Atlantic At-lantic Is that, when a tale Is as In-tiiur.tely In-tiiur.tely true to life as this Is of yours, the tone is surely a tone for the Atlantic to adopt. "It gives us much pleasure to accept ac-cept so admirable a story. "Very truly yours, The Editor." The dull old grimy kitchen swooped and soared about her. The letter shook like a tacking sail as she read It. "l'hillook here a minute.' "My Gawd!" said Phil, upon reading it. "liead It, Sam!" "When'joo write a story?" Sam said. Incredulously. "Oh, Phil, you don't suppose you don't suppose I'm I'm going to write!" "Well, for heaven's sakes," Lily said patiently, "the way you carried car-ried on, I thought some one was dead !" Gall sat at the table, her elbows resting on the worn oilcloth, pressing press-ing the crushed letter against her face. She felt as If her body -had taken wings and was about to lift Itself np Into the air. "Phil Lawrence," she whispered presently, taking her hands down, regarding him seriously, "I've sold a story !" He looked at her kindly from the tild rocker. Lily tired easily now. and had established her shapeless person wearily on his knee. Phil's eyeglassed eyes looked over Lily's head. "'Bout time something good came to you, Gall," Phil said simply. Ills sister felt the words to be an accolade. "Oh, I can't believe It It Isn't me!" Gail whispered. "It's It's the Lawrence luck, coming back!" She got up and carried the glass dish of strawberries Into the dining room. She lifted the cover of the pail, and poured the lightly tumbling tum-bling hulls down Into it. Then with a damp old rag she wiped the oilcloth, oil-cloth, afterward at the sink rubbing her linger tips with a withered half lemon. And all the time the julce-stalned julce-stalned letter blazed In the breast pocket of her old midshipman's blouse. CHAPTER X SO CAME Cllppersvllle to be proud of another Lucky Lawrence. A thousand pleasant little episodes, as the summer wore along, told Gall that she was famous and that her friends and neighbors were glad. The Challenge ran her picture witli a flattering article. Patrons of the old library, coming and going go-ing In the hot afternoons, smiled at her over the broad desk top. "Tickled to death to hear we have an authoress!" the women whispered, whis-pered, nodding and smiling. Gail would flush brightly, joyfully, In return. If Lily telephoned her, and she had to stop In the market, she saw the market or the fruit store or the flve-nnd-ten, with new eyes. Their wilted wares;, their wearied salesfolks, their anxious bargainers bargain-ers were newly dramatic. When some shabby woman from Thomas Street hill, with a fat, drooling baby on her arm, and another stumbling and whining at her knee, priced the pork chops, priced the chopped beef, looked worried from one to the other. Gall felt her heart go out on a rush of love and svmnathv for all poverty all motherhood. She did not know why. She had letters from persons, far-away, unknown persons, praising prais-ing htr story when it was published. Gall answered them simply, unable to believe the words that flowed from her fountain pen. She could presently write: "If you liked 'Simply Impossible,' I hope you will like 'Post Office Closed Tomorrow.' It is coming out very soon In some magazine." The great Parnes Rutherford, 111, Idling in a palace on the Maine coast, wrote her. lie, sixty-five, the dean of the greatest profession of all, could find time to write to a little Cllppersvllle girl, and tell her he thought "Simply Impossible" was a good story ! Even more touching were the literary folk of Cllppersville. It had so many! Wistful, discarded men and women, living in shabby little gas-lighted cottages smothered smoth-ered In dusty vines, suddenly appeared ap-peared on all sides, and proudly claimed kinship with the writer. Gail accepted their condescensions graciously; she knew that she was not of their Ilk. Miss Libby Gatty had sold a story to the Black Cat twenty-five years ago ; a story that one of the judges had thought deserved first prize. Miss Lou Bennett had known Ed ward Townsend, who wrote the Chimmle Fadden stories, when she had been in New York with her uncle in 1SS)7, and had met Archibald Archi-bald Clavering Gunter. "Oh, my uncle knew everybody !" said Miss Lou, tossing her withered head, growing splotchy In the face at the mere exciting memory. "He knew Frank Munsey ; he knew everybody !" Then there were the poets, most of them women. They tremblingly brought out for Gail's inspection their hoarded clippings, discolored strips of newspaper or magazine pages. Mrs. Jadwln, who ran a boarding house down by the flour mills, had once won a twenty-five-dollar prize for a poem called "Cloud Voices." "Oh, my dear!" said Hatty Sehenck, who wrote women's club news for the newspapers all over the state, and nature poems beginning begin-ning "Hail!" and whose pen name was "Lillian I.ynne." "Oh, my dear, is there any moment In the world like the one when you know you're getting it, you're in the mood? For, you know, I can't always write," Hatty rushed on. "Sometimes . . ." There were times F'hen she just felt dull and blank, ad If she'd never written a line. And then, suddenly, perhaps when she was in the kitchen kitch-en with Mamma ... "Oh, I know!" Gail would sympathize, sym-pathize, with dancing eyes. And all the time, deep within her, she knew that she and Hatty were not alike. She knew that she could lean down to Hatty, but that Ilutty could never reach up to her. It made her humble, and sometimes, when it came to her with a fresh pang of realization that only Edith could have shared all this truly, that only Edith would have appreciated appre-ciated it Indeed, that she owed much of it to the poem-loving, book-loving, book-loving, truth-loving little sister-she sister-she felt a deeper sorrow even than the younger sorrow had been. "I can kinder tell by your eyes when you're thinking of your sister," sis-ter," Lily said once, i "Edith?" "Well, I was thinking of Ariel, then." "Ariel . . . Gall always spoke the name on a long sigh. "She she couldn't wait," she would muse aloud sorrowfully. ' "Doesn't It seem funny, Lily, for a person to go away Just as If she had died and never to write never to send any word?" "She may have a houseful of kids by now," Lily, whose mind rather dwelt upon this subject, might suggest. sug-gest. "Even If she had!" "Did you like Richard Stebbins, Gail?" A quick twist at' her heart. A quick memory of a man's ugly, fine face and slow smile. But Gall's voice would come quietly enough. "Oh, very much. "Even If I could nccount for Ariel, I couldn't account for him," she said once. "Every family has some member in it that acts that way," Lily generalized gen-eralized shrewdly. In September Lily's daughter was born. Gail carried the newcomer down through the big open house to the kitchen, where she tremblingly trem-blingly wiped and oiled the mottled, writhing, weeping little scrap of womanhood. "God grant that I don't hurt you, baby!" said the Second Gall Lawrence Law-rence to the Third, aloud. The baby did not die under her ministrations, anyway. She whimpered, whim-pered, as her waving saffron arms were introduced Into the microscopic microscop-ic shirt, but when Phil and Lily's mother came down, hot and anxious, anx-ious, half an hour later, the little Gall was sound asleep in her namesake's name-sake's arms. "She's real pretty, Phil !" said the grandmother, proudly. "Is she?" "Well, she's Jest as elite's she can be. I don't know's Lily's ever had a better-lookin' baby. She's got the Lawrence look, all right." "Look at the Lawrence eyebrows, Phil." "Gee, she's sleeping hard," Phil observed, in a half-amused, half-resentful half-resentful tone. "Lily all right?" "I suppose so !" he muttered discontentedly. dis-contentedly. 'My G d !" he said, under his breath. He went to sit on the doorsill, his chin in his hands, elbows resting rest-ing on knees. There was the silence si-lence of a dreaming autumn Sunday Sun-day afternoon In the house that had been ringing with agony for the last endless hour. Old Mrs. Crowley went through the room with an unsightly bundle of linen. She lingered on her way to the laundry laun-dry tubs to smile at the youngest Lawrence. "She looks kinder mad at the way she was treated yes, she does ! She says, 'Why did ye yank me round that way, and spank me good, when I ain't done nothing!'" crooned the toothless old washwoman. wash-woman. "How do, Mis' Wlbser. How's all -your folks?" "All real well, thanks, Mis' Crowley. How's Hazel?" "Hazel had a bad spell last Sunday Sun-day 'twas a week ago." "You'd oughter be glad you don't have to have 'em !" Mrs. Wibser said to Phil's still bowed and horrified hor-rified back in the doorway. She chuckled. "Look at her sleep the darling," Gall murmured. "I always say that If the men had THE STORY FROM THE BEGINNING The luck that brought the Boston Lawrences to California at the beginning be-ginning of the gold rush seems to have deserted the present generation. From a 4.000-acre ranch, their holdings have shrunk to a small farm ami the old family home In Cllppersville. Phi!, twenty-five, is In the iron works. Sam and seventeen-year-old Ariel are In school. Gail in the public library and Edith In the book department of a store. Young Van Murchison, scion of a wealthy family, returns from Tale. Dick Stebbins, Phil's friend has the run of the Lawrence house. Ariel is sneaking out at night for Jjy rides. Gall, who would marry Van, feels she is making no progress In his affections. Phil suggests Inviting Lily Cass, his sweetheart, to suppe-though suppe-though Gail and Edith feel she is not "respectable." Gail goes with Van to a house party at Los Gatos with the Chipps, his uncle and aunt. She is received coldly. At a roadhouse Gail sees a drunken man with Ariel. Next day Ariel admits she was there, and displays no remorse. Ariel and tho driver of another car are booked for manslaughter as the result of accident In which a child Is killed. Dick Stebbins. who has been admitted to the bar, has the case against Ariel dismissed. Gall suddenly realizes that she loves Dick and not Van. Stebbins and Ariel elope, according to a not left by the girl. Phil and Uly are married and his wife and her three children make their home in the Lawrence house. Edith Is fatally injured in an accident for which little Danny, one of Lily's children. Is innocentlv responsible. After Edith's death Gail passes through a period of heart breaking grief. The colossal Murchison fortune Is swept away and Vin faces the world almost penniless. tn have 'em every other time, there'd only be two babies, his and then hers, and then no more!" old Mrs. Crowley said with relish. "Baby?" asked Biff -ruff, at Gail's knee, with a solemn upward glance. "Your baby sister." "Mrs. Lawrence," Betty Crooks, sailing into the room In all her formal for-mal nurse's regalia, said authoritatively, authori-tatively, "Mrs. Lawrence wants some one to go over to the Williamses' for the other children, and she said to tell you, Mr. Lawrence, that she feels fine and wants some tea!" "Tea!" Phil echoed, outraged. "Certainly. She feels fine, only she's sleepy. And she can have some tea before she goes off to sleep. Say," said Betty, who had been in school with Phil and Gall, "you aren't too tired to go up there and see her a minute?" "Too tired, no!" Phil said dazedly. "But but she doesn't want you heard her she feels as if I was to blame " "Oh, for goodness' sake, that was Just at the finish !" Betty said, wholesomely. "You go up and see her, and tell her I'm bringing up some tea !" Phil, with one wild glance about, fled to the accompaniment of women's wom-en's laughter. "You're going to be lucky," Gall murmured to the child. "The girl that Is born on the Sabbath day Is wise and lucky and good and gay !" The little warm, pulpy hand held tightly, confidingly, to her finger. It seemed gripped already about her heart. There was a smell of household house-hold oils, of clean new flannels, of sweet baby dampness. The baby seemed to sag limply against her arm. "You look like you could sit there forever, holdin' that child, Gail!" "I feel as If I never wanted to let her go, Mrs. Wibser." "They won't do that with every one," Mrs. Wibser said "lay so quiet, and act so good 1 I'll bet you're goin' to think a sight of that baby." "I'll bet I am," Gall said seriously. "Well," said the old woman to her granddaughter, "you've started on a hard journey, young lady! Some day," she added to Gail, "some day she'll be tellin' folks, 'Why, yes, I was born in a place called Clip-persville, Clip-persville, California.' Ain't that funny?" "Maybe life is Just a succession of births," Gail thought. "If they take 'The Bells of Saint Giles,' " she mused, 'I'll go to New York for a visit." A little laugh broke over the new baby's head. Gail's novel was bare- 1J. UCglllJ , One VJ i J uvv. Limb it would ever be a novel. But still she thought: "If they really do take 'The Bells of St Giles,' I'll go to New York." She loved to hold the baby at this time of the day, and when Lily was downstairs again and autumn . was deepening, darkening Into winter, win-ter, five o'clock often found Gail, with her little namesake In her arms, rocking, gossiping In the old kitchen. The days grew shorter; it was dark now when Gail came home from the library at five o'clock. As she sat cuddling the baby she could see the oak branches tossing in the dusk of the yard and the leaves scurrying down. The snap of the wood In the old French range and the smell of toast and tea were very grateful now ; there was a sense of coziness, of homeness about it. At this hour she would often fall to dreaming. It was an hour In which to remember Edith, talking eagerly of poetry, of drama, of Utopias and philanthropy, as she buttered pudding dishes and peeled apples an hour that brought back Ariel, spoiled, petulant, beautiful, always to be excused and adored by her sisters. Ariel, willful and discontented, scolding, raging, threatening, and presently to be whisked, limping and pitiful, upstairs up-stairs to be comforted and sponged ana sootnea to sieep. Above all, In the winter twilights, with the soft lump of babyhood that was another Gail Lawrence In her arms Gail dreamed of Dick and of the brief moment of romance that had somehow seemed to give her true values In life. She had been playing, playing Idly and superficially, superfi-cially, with Van Murchison, and she had awakened to the full realization realiza-tion of what her heart needed, what her heart could give, just a moment too late. It had been Ariel, all the time, for big, sober, quiet Dick. He had never seen Gall; she had never tried to help him find her. But she knew in her heart, that she could have given him a thousand thou-sand times what Ariel could give. Ariel must be changed indeed if she had become a helpful, tender mate for a struggling lawyer. Her restlessness, rest-lessness, her haughty discontent, would not be cured by anything that Dick could provide for her. Ariel's ideal was not one of home making, of quiet and domesticity beside a fire. Hollywood supposing them still to be In that neighborhood would only Inflame Ariel with a desire de-sire for luxury, fame, money. TO BE CONTINUED. |